Dark Rosaleen (27 page)

‘It was you, Kate, that turned her. You were the conflict within her. She had renounced her faith because of her love for me. But she could not commit you as well, for that would have been a double sin and she could never live with that. And, God help me, nor could I.

She did not stay. I would not let her. I arranged for her to go to a convent in Italy, near Lucca in Tuscany. The demons tore me apart, my mind seemed no longer any part of me, but I vowed I would not contact her ever again. God only knows how I did it. Less than a year later, I received a letter that told me she was dead. They said she had lost her mind. Then came the cruelty of what I had done, the sleepless nights of torment, the days and weeks and months of guilt. Punishment, yes! Never-ending. What a cruel and sinister Church it is that makes a man spurn the love I had and condemn the one I adored to die in such a way.'

He stood and held the arms of the chair for support. Kate stood with him and held out her hand. He did not take it.

‘You share our blood but hers is more potent than mine. How I prayed it might wash out of you! But now I see you are at one with her, through and through. She mocks me. And now this, the final torture.'

He walked slowly, hesitantly towards the door, still clutching his tumbler. Without turning, he said, ‘Goodbye Kate. If there is a God, let Him keep you safe.'

The door opened and she saw him briefly in the light from the hall. Then he was gone and she was alone, the child of a ghost, searching in the dark for the image of a mother she had never known.

Perfumes, creams, powders and lotions once littered her dressing table. Her wardrobe had been full of dresses and petticoats and shoes of a dozen styles and colours. Silver caskets overflowed with jewellery. The mirror now reflected a stranger to them all. She went quietly down the stairs, past her father's bedroom to the pantry and filled her saddlebag with pies and biscuits and a small stone flask of water.

She led her mare out of the stable and saddled up. It would be another hour before the sun rose and she would be far away before the stable boy raised the alarm. Her father would guess where she had gone and would send men after her. Perhaps soldiers, too. But she knew the country well and she would be there long before them. Una had told her where to go. Now it would be for Sir Robert Fitzgerald in Youghal to decide her fate.

‘It's a dangerous thing you're doing, Kate. And it's a doubly dangerous thing you're asking of me. I'm a magistrate and my duty tells me I should hold you until your father's men arrive.'

They sat in the kitchen. Sir Robert had brewed tea.

‘But the real business, Kate, is where to hide you. Maybe I can put them off for a day or two but your father will have them scouring every inch of bog and hill until they dig you out.'

‘My father has disowned me,' she said. ‘If I'm caught, he'll put me on a ship for England. Have you heard what happened in Dublin?'

‘Kate, who hasn't? What shenanigans. You're a feisty girl.'

‘I must get to Moran.'

‘And where would you find him? Provided he's still alive and the odds are against it.'

‘He's riding with Coburn. With the Young Irelanders.'

‘I know of them and they're dangerous people. They're not for you.'

‘I have no one else.'

‘You are determined?'

‘I am.'

‘There'd be no going back.'

‘I'll never go back.'

‘Never is a long time.'

Sir Robert poured more tea. He took the cover from a dish of oatcakes. Then he said, ‘I think I know a way, probably the only way. He'll not thank me for it but I'll send you to a friend of mine, a Protestant and a landlord too. His name is William O'Brien. Good stock. Descendant of King Boru, King of all Ireland. How's that, Kate? It's a great start to your adventures in the family of kings.' He laughed.

Kate did not smile. ‘You tell me this is dangerous. Now you say it's an adventure.'

‘So it is, Kate. An adventure while it lasts. A hanging when it ends. This is no game of make-believe. It is bound to go that way. Do you want a rope around that pretty neck of yours?'

‘Would you have me go to England?'

‘I just want you to know what it is you are doing, Kate. These rebels are violent, their heads full of wild dreams and many will not see their next birthday. They can fight for Ireland but you'll not show me a man who can win for Ireland. They will turn the English against us at a time when we need them most.'

‘I have nothing to lose.'

‘Except yourself.'

‘That doesn't seem so important now.'

‘You are important, Kate. There is only one of you and this life is not a rehearsal. The real world is beyond our shores and that world is yours.'

‘Will you help me, Sir Robert? Yes or no?'

‘Well if you won't sail to England, Kate, then we must find a way to keep you safe in Ireland. You will go to O'Brien and stay there until you make up your mind where you go next. But promise me, Kate, you will not get into this rebel thing any deeper.'

‘I can't promise you that, Sir Robert. I've taken sides. I am my mother's child.'

They supped more tea and ate the cakes and she told him her father's story, word for word, as best she could remember. When at last she was done, Sir Robert leant and kissed her on both cheeks.

‘You are your mother's child indeed. And Ireland's too perhaps. Jesus! This God of ours moves in the most cussed way but there's no mistaking it. This is His plan.'

He went to the door and called out to his yardman to fetch her horse.

‘Now ready yourself, Kate. We've no time to dawdle. I'll scribble a note to O'Brien and then you must go. My man will go with you. Trust him. And remember, Kate, you are with friends. We'll not fail you.'

The tide of human distress was now in full flood. Ireland was emptying. The Irish were leaving their doomed land in droves, like refugees escaping war. Thousands filled the roads to the ports of Dublin, Limerick and Cork and the smaller harbours of Baltimore, Ballina and Tralee. Those who could walk no further watched the procession of the stronger move on without them and waited to die. There was no pity.

The landlords accelerated the mass evacuation. It was the quickest, cheapest way for them to clear their estates of unwanted, unproductive human weight. They hired the ships and paid the fares on vessels already condemned as unfit for the Atlantic crossing. Timbers were rotten, seams uncaulked, sails shredded and their masters lied about the ration of food and water aboard. They were called the ‘coffin ships'. The port inspectors took their bribes and said nothing. There was much money to be made from misery.

The first ship to sail from Westport in County Mayo was grossly overloaded. Over four hundred emigrants were crowded into the hold. Despite a calm sea, the ship foundered on rocks and sank within sight of the land it had just left. All aboard were drowned, watched by those onshore who, only an hour before, had bid them farewell.

America was the dreamt-of destination, but only the fit and healthy were allowed to disembark there. Congress quickly passed emergency laws to bar the sick and diseased. Boston even refused entry into its harbour to all ships from Ireland and the New York harbour authorities demanded a bond of one thousand dollars from captains for every sick passenger aboard their ships. Ship owners refused to pay, and, after the suffering of the Atlantic crossing, shiploads of sick and starving immigrants were forced to sail north to Canada and the St Lawrence River. Grosse Island at the mouth of the river became their landing station and for many, many thousands, their burial ground.

Lord Palmerston, the future British Prime Minister, paid the entire costs of nine ships to sail from Sligo carrying two thousand of his tenants. Those who boarded the
Aeolus
, bound for Canada, were packed like herrings in a barrel. Over one hundred died during the crossing from typhus fever and dysentery. The survivors were put into the quarantined sheds on Grosse Island off Quebec as soon they landed. Many were too weak to walk off the ship.

For the first time, emigration across the Atlantic continued throughout the winter and this was the most severe in living memory. When another of Palmerston's ships, the
Richard Watson
, arrived, the master reported that nearly half of his passengers had died en route and were thrown overboard. The survivors disembarked near-naked in a snow blizzard and there was ice on the St Lawrence River. Palmerston's agents had promised every family money and an acre of land to help them resettle. The immigrants discovered there was no money and no land and Palmerston denied all knowledge of it.

Trevelyan appeared unmoved by the reports he read. But then, emigration was saving him money. The more Irish who left at the landlords' expense, the fewer there were to gorge on English aid, and fewer still to fill the workhouses. He was also reassured by a letter sent to him by Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies.

The desire to reach America is so exceedingly strong among the Irish emigrants that they are content to submit to very great hardships during the voyage.

How many thousands sailed with new hope to the New World only to perish in the coffin ships will never be known. But it was written at the time that a road of drowned skeletons drifted back and forth with the tide, from the shores of Ireland to the coasts on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.

There was a quicker, cheaper, less hazardous way to escape Ireland. Many more thousands went east across the Irish Sea to England, Scotland and Wales. A crossing that would take not months but hours.

The steamer
Faugh a Ballagh
was packed on its twice-weekly journey from Drogheda to Liverpool, a journey that cost only five shillings. Other shipping companies on the Mersey joined the lucrative business and emigrants were soon arriving at the rate of a thousand a day. By midsummer 1847, over three hundred thousand Irish had settled in Liverpool, a city with a population only a little over half that number. There were not enough police to cope and twenty thousand civilians had to be rapidly sworn in as special constables. A battalion of infantry was hurriedly garrisoned at the docks.

Ships sailing from Cardiff and Swansea, carrying coal from the Welsh valleys to Cork and Dublin, no longer returned to their home port empty. Their owners filled the coal dust holds with paupers at two shillings each for the one-way crossing. Some were given free passage as human ballast. There was a regular ferry service from Belfast and Londonderry to Glasgow and there were sometimes queues of people half a mile long waiting for a space.

Once they had landed, the Irish poor knew they would no longer be hungry. Britain's Poor Laws would provide for them. In return, they brought with them the diseases of famine and within months, as they spread out across the country, they carried typhus and dysentery with them. The British people would now pay in kind for their government's indifference.